It's autumn and I'm feeling alienated
 
Robert Remington 
Calgary Herald
http://www.canada.com/calgary/calgaryherald/columnists/story.asp?id=2F1A07E1-0A40-4065-8E36-85A178ED19B7

Monday, October 27, 2003
 
I'm in the chair waiting for my jaw to freeze, and I hear my dentist, who is from Quebec, talking to another patient about the lack of maple trees in Alberta.

"I'm thinking of planting a maple tree. Do they grow here?" she asks, pining for the splendid red foliage that right about now is at its peak in southern Ontario and Quebec.

"Gurg argg ughh glubb," replies the patient, but I can discern that she, too, misses the bright red sugar maple leaves of autumn, being a recent transplant from Ontario.

It is the first elementary lesson in western alienation that newcomers experience when they move to Calgary. Not only do we have streets of gold, but we also have trees of gold. Autumn is mostly a monochromatic, yellow affair in Alberta, lacking as we do the big sugar maples of the East.

Senate reform may be so much mumbo-jumbo from the intellectual elite, but when you realize that Canada's national symbol is nowhere to be found in these parts, you start to think, maybe there is something to all the whining and bitching after all.

According to the Government of Canada website, 10 species of maple grow in Canada and at least one grows naturally in every province. While that may technically be true, the maples around here are sad specimens compared with the mighty sugar maple of the East. To quote from Native Trees of Canada, by

R. Hosie, maples in the West are "coarse shrubs or small, bushy trees." In other words, our maples suck.

This did not go unnoticed on the pages of the Herald during the great flag debate of the '60s. Many who favoured the Red Ensign were wrongly assumed to be monarchists, when in reality they simply could not identify with the maple leaf.

"The prime minister will encounter serious difficulty if he tries to ram another national flag down the throats of western Canadians. There isn't a maple tree west of Ontario. It should be apparent to Mr. Pearson that he is treading on dangerous ground," Milt Harradence, the prominent Calgary lawyer, said when the Herald sampled Calgarians on May 20, 1964.

Parker Kent, a Herald editorial writer and columnist, and father of TV journalists Peter and Arthur (Scud Stud) Kent, wrote on March 3, 1961: "I see the maple leaf as a sinister conspiracy on the part of the eastern provinces, particularly Ontario and Quebec, to assert their claims to superior status in Confederation. The maple leaf is their emblem. It is not native to Western Canada."

Among the official justifications for the maple leaf was its use as a regimental symbol dating back to 1860. This, of course, was long before Alberta even became a province. Out here, the wimpy sugar maple can't even survive.

"The sugar maple is un-western," wrote Kent. "It isn't hardy enough to stand up to the climate."

The Manitoba maple is often cited as an example of a western maple, but in fact its name was changed from the box elder and it really isn't a tree at all, according to Herald gardening columnist Donna Balzer.

"It's a weed," she says. "It's a horrible plant." The only maple natural to Alberta, she says, is the Douglas maple, and its leaves turn yellow, not red.

I've lived in Alberta 30 years and it still bugs me that we have a national symbol I can only see in a book.

Clearly, Paul Martin has a large task of nation-building ahead of him, or perhaps tree planting, if he wants to truly address western alienation.

After he's adopted Senate reform, abandoned the gun registry, abolished the wheat board and polished Ralph Klein's limo, he needs to get the darn maple leaf off the flag.

I suggest he replace it with the limber pine, which grows only along the mountains in Alberta. "It refuses to go East," says Balzer.

Sounds like my kind of tree.